Education Tracking

Principals in U.S. Are More Likely to Consider Their Students Poor

The phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations” is inevitably associated with George W. Bush, who used it frequently. But whatever your politics, the idea has undeniable merit: If schools don’t expect much from their students, the students are not likely to accomplish much.

A new international study, set to be released Tuesday, argues that the United States has an expectation problem.

More so than any of the other 29 countries in the study, principals in American schools believe that many of their students come from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes. Based on the views of principals, a larger share of children in the United States are “socioeconomically disadvantaged” compared with those in Brazil, Malaysia, Mexico, Romania and various other countries.

The author of the paper is Andreas Schleicher, the director of education and skills research at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mr. Schleicher oversees the widely cited PISA test, which is the basis for comparing student performance around the world.

The new paper is based on a survey of principals that asked them whether at least 30 percent of students at their schools were socioeconomically disadvantaged. According to the results, almost 65 percent of classrooms in the United States have at least 30 percent of their students disadvantaged. By comparison, 44 percent of classrooms in Mexico clear that threshold. In Brazil, 40 percent do. The share is 26 percent in Australia, 10 percent in Sweden and 6 percent in Japan.

American School Principals, Seeing Widespread Poverty

In a survey of 29 countries, more principals in the United States reported having at least 30 percent of students come from socioeconomically disadvantaged homes than in any other country. Yet only 13 percent of American children meet an international definition of disadvantage, lower than in many other countries.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

60

40

20

0

Perception of disadvantage

Actual disadvantage

Australia

Brazil

France

Iceland

Japan

Malaysia

Poland

Portugal

Romania

Singapore

Sweden

United States

Percentage of children with low socioeconomic status

0

20

40

60

60

40

20

0

Perception of disadvantage

Actual disadvantage

Australia

Brazil

France

Iceland

Japan

Malaysia

Poland

Portugal

Romania

Singapore

Sweden

United States

Source: O.E.C.D.

After the United States, France and Israel are the two high-income countries where principals are most likely to see widespread disadvantage.

Mr. Schleicher compared these results with an index that measures disadvantage based on income, parents’ education and other factors. Not surprisingly, the United States has a smaller share of disadvantaged children according to this index — 13 percent — than most other countries. (A different cutoff that defined more American children as disadvantaged would nonetheless show less poverty than in other countries.)

“I never would have expected it,” Mr. Schleicher said of the results. He added that he found the results especially worrisome because principals’ perceptions of disadvantage correlated more strongly with student performance than actual disadvantage. That is, low-income students perform particularly poorly on mathematics tests in countries where a large number of principals describe their students as disadvantaged — like the United States.

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One possibility is that principals in the United States indeed have lower expectations of lower-income students than principals in other countries – and that these expectations, in turn, affect student learning. Mr. Schleicher leans toward that view.

The usual caveats about correlation and causation apply, though. It’s also possible that an outside factor is driving the results of the survey question. The United States, for example, has an extensive and high-profile program of subsidizing lunches for lower-income children. If that program were driving principals’ definition of socioeconomic disadvantage, and other countries did not have similar programs, it could explain why this country is an outlier in the survey. In that case, American principals may or may not have lower academic expectations of their students.

This much is clear: American students from low-income backgrounds are more likely to struggle in school than low-income students in many other countries (as Table II.A in this report makes clear). And American principals are much more likely to describe their students as disadvantaged than principals in many other countries — including some countries that are significantly poorer than the United States. Neither fact qualifies as good news.